The one constant in my life as I travel hither and yon is my big backpack. And like all other close companions, I’ve already established a love/hate relationship with it. It’s very hard to pack for one year or more. In fact, obviously, you can’t technically pack for a year. I had to get it out of my head that I was packing for 365 days of travel. You really just have to pack for one week and remember there is a lot of laundry in your future and, of course, you can always buy something if you need it.

I’d only been on the road a few weeks and had already sent home one care package of extra clothes that I just didn’t need and, as time passed, I’d bought a few new shirts (re-wearing the same 6 over and over gets old real quick) and gave away some others and a pair of sandals. One thing you always have is a limit—there is just so much you can stuff into your backpack without the seams starting to burst.

It was nice not to have TOO many clothes, but I did miss having a bit more variety. But, on the flip side, it was the first time I really felt like I was getting the most out of my duds.

Packing and unpacking my bag became one of my new chores in life. It was not exactly fun, but I just needed to remember it was replacing things like working 8+ hour days, riding the train for an hour to and from work, vacuuming, washing dishes, etc. The part that made my obsessively neat side happy was the separate Ziploc-type air-releasing clothes bags I brought. Not only did they help to keep all my clothes compressed, my favorite part was how they kept my garments organized—pants in one bag, shirts in another, and the under-things in a third. This made life a whole lot easier when I had to crash in one place for just one night. Loved these.

My backpack is what they call a convertible. (Oooh yeah, put the top down!) No, it has wheels and an extendable handle so you can not only roll it, but it also has a flap in back that unzips to reveal some straps and a waist belt so you can hoist it onto your back when necessary. I’d wondered if I should’ve just bought the regulation huge backpack I saw on nearly every traveler I met. With mine it seemed more like I was strapping a huge suitcase to my back.

Fortunately there were only a few times I actually have had to wear “big red” like a backpack. Boarding a boat taxi in Costa Rica in knee deep water was one of them. Another was in Chile hobbling over a rocky road which became a rocky sidewalk which just turned into a grassy steep hill that led to my hostel with the great view, but the very sweat-inducing and nearly impossible access. Normally I had to actually sit down to strap my pack to my back. In Puerto Montt, some old, leathery Chilean woman had to help me hoist the forty pound monstrosity on to my tired, disoriented body.

But, fortunately, I received the always welcomed ‘stamp of approval’ from some fellow backpackers. A girl from Switzerland was admiring my pack in Costa Rica and loved how it opened like a suitcase instead of a rucksack like hers where she had to put everything in through the top and therefore had to dump out the contents anytime she needed to get at something and, inevitably, that ‘something’ was bound to be all the way at the bottom. Plus it is made by Victorinox—the famous Swiss Army Knife Company. It’s not exactly ‘razor-sharp,’ but the name brand also helped woo her Swiss praise.

The big red pack comes with a separate but attachable smaller day pack. This I use just as it says—on day trips to carry my camera, rain jacket and other possibly important daily necessities like ‘womanly items’ or my cool compass/flashlight/thermometer/magnifying glass tool. You never know when you will suddenly be lost in the dark and need to know the temperature and have to read some fine print!

Things I Brought that I Loved:

Packable Rain Jacket

Laptop

Camera

Big hair clip

Nylon shorts and pants with zip pockets

Sleep Sack (saved me from some pretty rank sheets)

Micro Fiber Mini Towel

Duct Tape (patched up holey screen to keep out pesky Costa Rican mosquitoes and a million and one other uses)

See my “How LL” page for more details on what I brought and how a world tour is planned.

Sadly, since writing this, I lost my cool thermometer-slash-compass. Or it was stolen? I think the latter. I mean who wants a laptop when you can have a cool gizmo like that?

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Lisa Lubin is an Emmy-award-winning television writer/producer/photographer/vagabond. After 15 years in broadcast television she took a sabbatical of sorts, traveling and working her way around the world for nearly three years. You can read her work weekly here at Britannica, and at her own blog, www.llworldtour.com.